City of Flowers (38 page)

And now his kidnapper had turned up at the Embassy, cool as a lettuce, and walked straight up to him and struck him in the face with a long leather glove! Luciano raised one hand to his smarting cheek and his other flew to the hilt of his weapon.

But Enrico raised his own hand to stop him.

‘Hold there,' he said pleasantly. ‘The blow was not from me and should be repaid to him who sent it. The Grand Duke Niccolò di Chimici challenges you to defend the insult given to his honour. He will meet you at dawn on Friday in the grounds of the new Nucci palace. You may bring two seconds.'

Luciano felt as if he were having a bad dream.

‘What insult? There must be a mistake. I have not spoken to the Grand Duke since I dined with him a month ago. And I have never knowingly insulted him.'

‘Too bad,' said Enrico. ‘The Grand Duke has issued his challenge and if you refuse it you will be branded as a coward and subject to his persecution.'

‘That's completely senseless,' said Luciano.

‘So you refuse the challenge?' asked Enrico.

Luciano suddenly felt reckless. He had said he would kill Niccolò if he asked Arianna to marry him and now he had the opportunity to do it legitimately. It didn't matter that she had refused the Grand Duke; she had done it for the wrong reason. He would kill him anyway.

‘Tell your master I'll be there,' he said.

Sky stravagated back to his world early that night, without waiting for Nicholas. He was as exhausted as Georgia and wanted to catch up on some sleep. He was confused about his role in Talia now. The Stravaganti hadn't prevented the deaths at the weddings, he had done what he could to help the injured and he no longer knew why he was supposed to be visiting the other world.

Perhaps it had all been to save Sandro from the Eel? The boy certainly wouldn't have offered himself as a novice friar, Sky was sure, if he hadn't befriended ‘Brother Tino' and become closer to Sulien. Georgia had warned him that the reason he had been brought to Talia might be different from what he thought. She had believed she was needed in Remora to help Falco translate into Nicholas, but in the end she had replaced Cesare in the mad horse race and struck a further blow for the independence of Bellezza. But Sky didn't see what that had to do with him and his visits to Saint-Mary-among-the-Vines. In fact it made his brain hurt even to think about Talia. It had all got so complicated.

It had been much more straightforward when it had just been him and Sulien in the friary, and now it was all tangled up with Nicholas and Georgia, and even Alice. It had been much easier at the beginning to separate his daily life from his nightly journeys to the other world. Now they seemed to be sort of leaking into one another.

He woke early and set out for Georgia's house as soon as he reasonably could. Paul was going to be in town again and Rosalind was singing while she washed her hair. It seemed to Sky that being an adult was much less complicated than being a teenager – particularly a teenager who was a Stravagante.

When Sky got to Georgia's house it was Alice who opened the door. He put his arms round her, burying his face in her hair; it smelt good. He wondered if she had sung in the shower at the thought of spending the day with him.

‘Are you OK?' she asked.

‘Pretty much,' said Sky. ‘My arm's a lot better and I came back early last night – I was so knackered.'

Georgia let them in and the three of them waited for Nicholas to arrive. Her parents had already left and the house felt calm and quiet. They made mugs of instant coffee and took them out into the garden with slabs of a chocolate cake Maura had bought. It was sunny and still warm, as it had been in Devon, and tulips were beginning to come up in the flower beds among the daffodils. They sat at the wooden pub table where barbecues were eaten in the summer and Georgia shared her worries about Nicholas.

‘He's shutting me out,' she said. ‘I've always known what he was thinking and planning before, but all I know now is that the signs aren't good.'

‘Do you think he still wants to go back to Giglia?' asked Alice. ‘Even though he's been stabbed there?'

‘I think he wants it more than ever,' said Georgia. ‘He's seen what his family has been through the last few days and it's bound to make him want to be with them.'

‘I'd have thought he was well out of it,' said Alice, shivering in the warm sunshine. She couldn't wait for her friends to finish their Talian adventure. She just didn't understand the fascination it held for them.

‘Georgia's right,' said Sky. ‘I think he has got some sort of plan. He went to see Luciano today, after he'd checked his brothers were doing OK.'

The doorbell rang and the three of them jumped guiltily.

A body of the Grand Duke's soldiers accompanied Matteo Nucci and a dozen of his followers to the north-east gate of the city. He was glad that his route to Classe did not take him past the new palace where he and his family would never live. He had been allowed only the clothes he wore and the horse that would take him away from Talia. But Matteo Nucci had money in cities other than Giglia.

Graziella had accompanied him as far as the gate, promising to bring Filippo and the girls on to Classe as soon as possible.

‘Believe me, I shall not stay a minute longer than I have to in this city,' she said bitterly. ‘I can think of nothing better for us now than to live in a city where the di Chimici do not rule.'

They embraced then and parted.

*

In another part of the city, a young boy was being robed as a Dominican novice. He had to make his preliminary vows in the church; then he would be entitled to eat all his meals and spend all his nights quite legitimately at Saint-Mary-among-the-Vines.

‘But you must give up swearing, gaming and keeping loose company,' said Brother Tullio solemnly.

‘And you won't be able to keep the dog,' said Brother Ambrogio. ‘Friars aren't allowed to have pets.'

Sandro looked absolutely stricken.

‘Don't tease him,' said Sulien. ‘Fratello sounds like a friar already. He shall be Brother Dog and live in the kitchen with Tullio. We need something to keep down the rats. Now, are you ready to take your vows?'

Sandro looked round; he wished that Brother Tino and Brother Benvenuto could be there to see him through the ceremony, but he understood that they could not be in Giglia at night-time; it was all to do with their shadows and their lives in the other world. But the encouraging smiles he was getting from Sulien and the others were enough to make him feel he belonged. He was going to get a family at last – not the kind of brothers he had once imagined and neither the Father nor Mother were where he could see them. But it was enough.

‘I'm ready,' he said.

It was much worse than any of them had thought. Nicholas hadn't wanted to discuss it at first, but of course Georgia had wanted to know everything about his seeing Luciano, since she had missed a day in Giglia.

‘Well, he told me he has to fight a duel with my father,' said Nicholas. It was true, but he had found this out only later. If possible he was going to keep from the others the plot he hoped Luciano would agree to. But this news was startling enough.

‘A duel?' said Georgia. ‘But surely he can't beat Duke Niccolò?'

‘
Grand
Duke Niccolò,' Nicholas corrected her. ‘It's true that Gaetano won't be able to help him. It will be weeks before he's strong enough to hold a sword. But Sky can be one of his seconds. He's allowed two.'

‘How can you be so calm about it?' demanded Georgia. ‘Even if Luciano could beat Niccolò in a fair fight – which I doubt – how can we be sure the Grand Duke will fight fair?'

‘Why has he challenged Luciano now?' asked Sky. ‘You'd have thought he'd be grateful for what he did when we got the medicine.'

‘Luciano said his challenge was about an insult to his honour,' said Nicholas. ‘But he didn't know what.'

‘Maybe Arianna turned Niccolò down,' suggested Alice.

They all turned to her in horror; what she said made a kind of sense. If Niccolò was jealous, challenging Luciano to a duel was just the sort of thing he would do.

Georgia felt a pang – would Luciano fight the Grand Duke if Niccolò had proposed to her? Then the absurdity of the very idea overtook her and she laughed, a bit hysterically.

‘He'll be killed, for sure,' she said. ‘And there'll be no other life for him this time.'

Nicholas couldn't bear to see her so upset; he thought he would be able to console her.

‘I wouldn't be so sure,' he said.

*

Niccolò di Chimici took possession of the palace over the river the next day. But Giglians kept the name for it; though generations of di Chimici grand dukes and princes would live there and no member of Matteo's clan ever set foot in it again, it was never known as anything other than the Nucci palace.

Niccolò had a good reason for moving in; his sons were recovering and he wanted them back under his own eye. The Palazzo Ducale felt tainted to him; he would always connect it with the remnants of wedding-feast finery washed up against the steps, his public humiliation by his brother and his proposal to the Duchessa on the night before the weddings, which had been all in vain.

The Nucci palace, undamaged by the flood, represented a new start, and the Grand Duke was good at new starts. He walked through the fine reception rooms, admiring the taste and wealth behind their decoration and furnishings. He ordered all the Nucci portraits to be taken down and representations of his own family put in their place; the Nucci coat of arms was also hacked off the stonework and hastily painted wooden escutcheons with the arms of the Giglian di Chimici fixed in their place.

Enrico walked through the palazzo too, a few steps behind his master and the architect Gabassi. The Eel was also in need of a new project and he was as taken with the grandeur of the palace as Niccolò was. He had a vision of becoming the Grand Duke's steward in his new home; what vistas of opportunities for skimming off silver into his own pocket were opening before him!

They moved up the grand staircase to the upper floors. The rooms were all furnished, the cupboards and chests full of linen and the library full of codices and manuscripts. All this was now di Chimici property because of the blow struck by Camillo Nucci in the Church of the Annunciation. The Grand Duke allocated bedchambers for himself and Beatrice and temporary ones for Fabrizio and Gaetano and their brides. They would keep Fabrizio here until he was well enough to go back to the Ducal palace and Gaetano until he could return to the Via Larga, where he would live as planned with Francesca.